PEIBlogs.com: the definitive Prince Edward Island blogroll since 2004.: News and Views

I applaud the fortitude and foresight of the Charlottetown City Council, who recently decided to block a proposed Mount Edward Road cellphone tower. In the city, we take it for granted that residential community needs take precedent over development.

But a similar battle which took place in my home community of Gowan Brae (near Souris), turned out very differently.

The provincial government has worked with Maritime Electric to establish the power grid for high-profile Elmira Wind Test site. The grid is serviced by large poles (30 per cent higher than average), with significant voltage coursing through them. Unfortunately, the ?planned? transmission route cuts through the beautiful and safe community where I grew up.

For one year, Gowan Brae residents voiced concerns over the link between cancer and electromagnetic radiation and the depreciation of land values in the community. The latter is significant, as land is the main financial asset for most. We have brought these issues to Kings County MLA Andy Mooney, Environment, Energy, and Forestry Minister Jamie Ballem, Premier Pat Binns, and other government representatives. These individuals have merely left us to work with Maritime Electric and find a bypass for the transmission line.

In recent weeks, the company has decided changes to this line can not fall outside their project budget. They, too, have walked, leaving a rural community to pay a collective price so that they may meet their projected profit target.

Islanders might well question the monopoly privilege enjoyed by Maritime Electric, who are ostensibly willing to put profit over community welfare. But more alarming, is how residents of this community were left without benefit of protective policy or government representation in this process.

I am a current resident of Stratford. I know that no-one would ?plan? a transmission line through here, or the City of Charlottetown. But there is no protection for my mother and her neighbours in Gowan Brae, who are left feeling frustrated, manipulated, disempowered, and abandoned.

We need a government that is going to protect all communities on Prince Edward Island.

Signed,

Dylan Mullally
Stratford

Back on November 17, 2006, when my brother Dylan and I met with Maritime Electric, the utility employees described how they approached several landowners in the process of securing a bypass route. At this meeting they identified weak landowner cooperation as the most significant challenge they faced. However, they also, to our surprise, reaffirmed their commitment to finding a bypass. We discussed the idea of burying the lines, with the idea this would mitigate the visual impact. It would make my mother and others who were more worried about the EMR health risks happy by ?burying? their concerns as well. The utility representatives at this meeting were open to discussing all possibilities. After getting their verbal agreement to make greater efforts to mitigate the harm the transmission lines would bring to our community, I asked for and received a written statement confirming this intent.

It is posted here:

Dear Sasha:

"As we discussed at our Friday meeting Maritime Electric is most certainly willing to explore alternative transmission line routing around the Mullally and O'keefe residences [[subsequent correspondence on November 21 amended this statement to include "the residential areas on the Grant Road Hill"] and, yes, if the land under discussion is suitable for an alternative route then we are willing to consider compensation up to $3000\acre. Hopefully our opportunity to speak with you on Friday and take you through all of the steps that we've taken to date to attempt to deal with the concerns of residents in the area has demonstrated that we have, indeed, acted in good faith to date and we will continue to act in good faith. let me know if you'd like to proceed with a meeting with the parties involved [these are landowners who might be willing to an easement].

"I've attached a picture of a "cable to overhead structure" and as we indicated at the meeting this type of structure is unsightly and would run counter to the objectives of keeping the viewscape as unencumbered as possible. Two of these type of structures would be required: one for overhead wire to cable transition on one end and one for cable to overhead wire transition on the other end. A wooden structure would have to be heavily guyed and would not look any better.

[here, in the original, they provided a picture of this structure]

"Further this type of construction is very expensive relative to overhead construction and therefore it is very difficult for us to rationalize the cost of this alternative.

"So we'd prefer to work with you on the "short cut" alternative above. I'll await to hear back from you on the next steps."

Regards,

I then went up home and met with several landowners, taking significant time away from my work to address this important issue. At the end of November, I had another meeting with the utility, a meeting that included senior management. This meeting provided an opportunity to specifically discuss other options for the bypass not considered by Maritime Electric, and identify other landowners who might be amenable to allowing easements. In particular, I pointed out that one landowner, one whom the utility had approached in the spring of 2006, was not given due time to consider the option, and should be approached again.

The Maritime Electric officials and senior management at this meeting were responsive, and after reviewing these options, they confirmed the utility?s willingness to move the poles and revisit the bypass. Again, they provided me, upon my request, with a second statement confirming their intent. It is posted here:

?We appreciated the opportunity to sit down this morning and review new options to have our transmission line bypass the Grant Road area where your family, and other residents, have concerns about their view scape and diminished property values because of the presence of our transmission line.

?You brought two new potential overhead bypass routes to our attention that could be negotiated with landowners on the north side of the Grant Road. We also discussed an underground cable option which we both had some reservations with respect to. We really appreciated the extent of your preparation you had for the meeting--both with respect to the extent of conversations you?ve had with community members and your mapping of potential routes in the area.

?You?ve agreed to share with us the contact information for these new land holders and also to act as a facilitator, if necessary, in the negotiation process and we are appreciative of this.

?As soon as you provide the contact information we will pursue the agreed upon #1 option by contacting the two new landholders and asking for a meeting at their earliest convenience to secure their intention to provide an easement for the transmission line. If this should fail we will then pursue option #2. We will also go to Grant Road as soon as possible to inspect the proposed routes to ensure there are no issues with the topography of the land that would interfere with our construction or future maintenance\emergency access to the line. We commit to keeping you posted on our progress (when meetings are scheduled, what the outcome was, and what our next steps and related timing will be). When you feel it necessary we can meet again to review the new information.

?Sasha, at the beginning of this process Maritime Electric said it would consider any reasonable proposal to address the concerns of residents in the area. We meant it then and we mean it now. We have acted in good faith from the outset and we certainly will continue to do so moving forward and will make a sincere attempt to make one of the above two options work.

?We look forward to receiving the contact information from you and working with you toward a bypass solution for the residents of the Grant Road.?

[Signed, Vice-president, Customer Service]

Please note that in both statements provided above, the focus is on demonstrating ?good faith? and establishing goodwill. Goodwill is the word that came up most often in our correspondence and in person at meetings. In the face of government stonewalling, the responsiveness of the utility was very heartening. We decided to work in ?good faith? with them, take their statements at face value, and put our trust in them.

So let us see if this trust was well-placed. In the above correspondence, you can see that the utility committed to consider ?reasonable? routes and that any process of ?rationalization? was very much in the background. What any ?rationalization? might mean was, moreover, rather obscure at this juncture, overshadowed as it was by references to ?good faith.?

By April 2007, ?rationalization? would come to mean this: that the bypass must cost the utility no more than the cost of going along the highway which cuts through our community. But this convenient qualification is absent from the above two statements provided at the end of last November. The term only features above once, with reference to the utility?s consideration of the underground cable. And even in this case, they did not rule out this option last fall, even though it would have definitely cost more than following the route above ground! I am sure careful readers will agree that it is extremely telling how, in the fall of 2006, the utility only said they had a ?preference? for working to find an above-ground route.

Their position would harden considerably over the months which followed.

Fiscal considerations were a secondary consideration in our joint attempts over December, January and February, to identify willing landowners for the bypass route. The utility found it convenient to point to community uncooperativeness as the real barrier to a successful bypass, as if money were not the problem at all. Reviewing the statements above, you will see there is some reference to topography, and concerns as to the suitability of the terrain. However, a mid-December email I received from Maritime Electric?s Manager of Operations stated that, after viewing the area suggested for a bypass, that the terrain involved in the two routes under consideration above was suitable for their purposes; it was, in fact, ?one they could use.?

Fiscal considerations and difficulty with the terrain featured nowhere in our subsequent debates over using other public-land options. When, in early 2007, I questioned senior management about the possibility of routing the transmission line on three contiguous pieces of government woodland that would enable a transmission line bypass, the objection was not that it would be too expensive, or too difficult to clear, or that government itself was unwilling, but that management ?wanted to pursue one route at a time.?

My correspondence with Maritime Electric officials, collected since the end of November 2006, is voluminous. In a previous post I have indicated how carefully I have re-read and gone through this material to see when things started to fall apart?to see when a seemingly cooperative and caring corporation apparently decided to unilaterally drop a stated commitment to bypass Grant Road/Gowan Brae with their high-voltage wires. Having sifted through this archive, I have located the point where their tune shifted. It happened in March. To be exact, the first time that it was intimated that ?rationalization? must take place, and that this process of ?rationalization? was defined as a zero differential cost re-routing, was on March 13, 2007. This is approximately one week after we finally, successfully, identified landowners who would allow the poles to cross their land to complete the bypass. This perfectly reasonable route was negotiated and brokered in full cooperation with utility employees assigned to this project.

I am a fairly alert and careful person, and I noticed the inclusion of ?rationalization? by senior management in email correspondence on March 13, and I questioned use of this new term as soon as I opened the message. Senior management then tried to claim consistency by referring back to the first, original statement given above. But, can any readers see any requirement of a revenue-neutral bypass option in either of the statements?

No, neither can I find one.

So, having established this inconsistency on the part of the utility, and having shown how they again wasted a considerable amount of community time, and my personal time, it still remains for one to explain this frustrating shift. What happened between November and March? What happened to shift the discourse from one which emphasized goodwill, good faith and commitment to one which put money and profit before all else?

Some reasons were given to me on April 20. Having had a number of weeks to think about this, a few other explanations come to mind as well. This post is lengthy enough, so I?ll discuss them all next week. And following from and rising out of these explanations, we will see the beginnings of a clear blueprint for working around such problems, and avoiding these conflicts, in the future. Those individuals who find themselves with new office at that time (there is currently a provincial election in Prince Edward Island) might give them due consideration.

Three community members, one of whom was my brother Conor, secured signatures from 100% of permanent residents in the area (two renters abstained).

It cannot be said that this is not a concern for everyone in our community.

Our petition is below.

Community of:

Grant Road / Souris River Road / New Zealand / Gowan Brae

Objection Registry

to the Maritime Electric High Voltage Transmission Line

We, the undersigned, hereby register our objection to the route of the Maritime Electric high voltage power transmission lines, erected through our community in the Fall 2006. Our concerns are summarized:

1. Our community, a longstanding residential area, is one of the more scenic areas on Prince Edward Island, with a spectacular view of the bay, ocean, and rural countrysides. Many of the residents in our community have purchased properties and homes with this attraction in mind; many have chosen to live raise families in the area because of the peace, quiet and safety the locale affords. A small rural subdivision is currently being developed for these reasons. Transmission lines which were routed through our community in the Fall 2006 dramatically detract from the desirability that this location offers.

2. Many in our community are concerned by the health hazards of electromagnetic radiation; all are affected by public perception of the effects of EMR (regardless of interpretation of the research), which significantly compromise property values.

3. We believe that alternative options were not adequately addressed logistically or from a cost-benefit perspective. We petition that resources be allocated for an alternative route for this section of the transmission line, and the problem immediately rectified.

It was the institution of government that unleashed those vices of greed and avarice encouraging people to build on sand. It did so by first placing a policy priority on the good idea of home ownership but pursued it with a fanaticism that neglected other goods such as prudence and rational risk assessment.

In a very familiar parable, Jesus tells the story of two home builders. One built a house on sand, the other on rock. The house on the rock withstood the weather. The one built on sand did not fare so well: "The rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew, and they beat upon that house, and it fell, and great was the fall thereof" (Matthew 7:24-29).

If the parable were retold today, it might include an episode in which treasury officials and members of Congress cobbled together a bailout program for the owner and lender of the house on the sand. No matter how much money they spent, however, the ending would be the same.

Six weeks ago, when the $700 billion bailout of failing financial firms was being considered, the country was swept up in the debate. The bill, which created the Troubled Assets Relief Program (TARP), passed with thin public support. Washington claimed that the bill was necessary to keep the world from an economic Armageddon. Many people suspected that it amounted to little more than welfare for Wall Street.

Who was right? Consider the dramatic change made to the way the program works, as announced last week by Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson. He said that the government would no longer purchase toxic assets from failing institutions. It would now start giving the money directly to lenders. In other words, the entire rationale of the bailout changed overnight.

Why the change? The problem with the original idea is that it violated every common-sense rule of business. The government would pay far more than the market would bear and then, no doubt, we would watch as the market price slid to the bottom. Every time a supporter claimed that this was a good deal for taxpayers, you could almost sense the rise in deep skepticism. If you believed them, I've got a house built on sand to sell you.

A recent American study reported that many editors and reporters simply do not trust their readers to make good decisions. Let's be clear about what this means. This is a polite way of saying that these editors and reporters think their readers are too stupid to think for themselves.

- Rupert Murdoch